ByMatthew ShaerDecember 13, 2013

Days after it was hit by a widespread outage, Yahoo Mail is still unavailable for many users.

In a Twitter message posted Thursday afternoon, the Yahoo Mail team said it was "working tirelessly to restore access to those still having issues," but acknowledged in other messages that service would likely not be fully online before Friday. "[W]e expect all emails to be delivered by tomorrow afternoon," read one note to a frustrated user. By all accounts, the outage began on Monday.

In a blog post Wednesday, Yahoo's Jeffrey Bonforte said the problems had "been traced to a hardware problem in one of our mail data centers. The issue has been harder to fix than we originally expected."

An ordinary outage, right? Well, not so fast, writesKara Swisher of All Things D. In a scathing piece posted Thursday, Ms. Swisher points to a series of "multi-day outages" that have not been adequately explained or even addressed by the Yahoo staff.

"What is consistent are two things: Outages have been occurring regularly and Yahoo has been woefully negligent in informing its users about the problems," Swisher writes. "They have also declined to return emails inquiring about the issue and others related to Yahoo Mail from this site for weeks, in perhaps the most astonishing display of PR incompetence I have experienced in a very long time."

She continued: "[T]the contrast to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s insistence on engineering excellence and innovation and the inability of the company to provide a cogent explanation about what is happening to one of its most important daily interfaces with its customers could not be any more stark."